


cain was angry / he moved in a blood red fury

by roserot



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Broken Bones, Canon Compliant, Canon Temporary Character Death, Codependency, Dissociation, Gore, Implied/Referenced Incest, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Pre-Canon, Torture, Violence, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2018-11-20 14:25:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11337339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roserot/pseuds/roserot
Summary: Genji had betrayed them, betrayedhim? What had they offered him? What had they done to make Genji so willingly turn his blade against his own brother? Overwatch was not a peaceful organization, although they campaigned for it - they would spearhead the destruction of their family business, and crumble every inch of the Shimada name until they were nothing but ashes and the memories of legends, like their dragons before them.Genji was not just a liability; Genji was a traitor. Genji had betrayedhim.





	cain was angry / he moved in a blood red fury

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Novabled](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Novabled/gifts).



> please head the warnings. if this makes you uncomfortable, please turn back now. i moderate all comments. this is straight whump written for a friend. if you see any mistakes / awkwardness, let me know. i didn't really beta this. i've been working on this for a month, i just wanted to be finished. 
> 
> (reuploaded)

The sharp click of talons against the tatami mats is enough to disturb the elder from where he meditates, hands clenched into fists atop his knees in the _seiza_ position. “You’re late. Were you followed?” He does not doubt that it is his brother; the familiarity of his aura, the spirit within him that called to his own, could belong to no other; still, he speaks sharply, quietly, as if he’s afraid someone will interrupt the only moments of respite they allow each other whilst his eyes open slowing, adjusting to the dim candles in the temple. To his right, his katana and bow rest side by side, laid out like offerings to the old gods. To his left, the incense he burned in hopes of discreetly sending away any of the family who would otherwise disturb his meditation.

Genji scoffs, “course not.” It’s the sound of self-assured behavior, cockiness like weeds, growing over the skin and bones of a presumptive heir. It is uniquely Genji in the way that he makes it seem charming. “You doubt my efficiency in dealing with tails, _anija_?” Hanzo’s shoulders tense, as Genji baits him, the rising lilt of his voice he likes to use when they teeter on the precipice of another argument. Another click, closer behind the heir, followed shortly by the rustling of fabric.

“I think you grow too comfortable with people and forget their intentions are always hidden. If you truly wished for your tracks to be covered, they would be, but you are not always aware of who might be a tail.”

“I’m not like you, anija. I like to trust people to have good intentions when they’re with me.” Genji replies, slithering arms around the thinness of his brother’s waist, wrists and hands folding over each other like paper cranes. His chest flush against Hanzo’s back, chin resting on his shoulder, for a moment, a breath, before he moves to press feather-light kiss against the place where his brother’s pulse thunders in his veins.

Still, Hanzo’s shoulders tense further; _there it was._ The topic of the elder’s discussions, the constant forcing of Hanzo’s hand until he felt it nearly break under their scrutiny, disappointment lurking in gazes directed to the younger. Hanzo had been pushed and prodded and bent into shapes hat he felt his resolve to protect his rebellious brother slowly forming cracks — that he too would eventually look towards his brother with no longer affection, but disdain and aggravation. Sobering the tone of their meeting was not in the plan.

Even lower, as if they were planning to plot the assassination of an emperor, Genji speaks again — “What did they tell you?”

Something shifts under Hanzo’s skin — Genji _must_ feel it, for his grip tightens, desperate to keep him present, head and heart in rhythm. To Hanzo, it feels as if his entire being is alight with dragons fire, flesh a mere temporary house for an ancient, omnipotent leviathan of legend. It shifts, baring ugly teeth. _Blood. I want blood._

Hanzo pries himself away, cutting metaphysical tendons and ties, chest locked in a deep aching — he is pulling apart from the other half of himself, a garment cut from the same cloth, stitched into being with the same bloodied needle, but he must, for the ugly part of himself that he has tried many years to stifle has begun to speak. He rises, spine straightening, no longer a meditative being, but a warlord, a soldier prepared for battle.

“You have become a liability, Genji. Your — ” he swallows, vitriol slipping too deep into his mouth, turning all sentiments of love to ash. He sounds like their father now. “ _Whoring_ around has backed them into a proverbial wall. I cannot protect you from it anymore.”

Genji frowns, eyebrows furrowing, his lips tightening into a line as he shifts his hands, palms turned upwards. Bright neon stamps of _VIP_ and _20+_ in multiple places along both wrists has him pulling his sleeves down, hiding away evidence of his crimes. “Fuck it.” The harsh syllables force a visible twitch from his elder brother, and Genji, in all his pettiness, calls it a victory. “I’m tired of killing and hurting people for them. They don’t care about _us,_ Hanzo.”

“They are _family,_ Genji. It is dishonorable for you to do this to them — to _me._ ” The elder replies, locked in a battle of wills to understand what it is that forces Genji to speak as it does. Should he turn and try to read it from his brother’s face, or hope that it did not need to be spoken of at all? He turns.

Genji is _pitiful._ His hands clench uselessly around his belt, fiddling with the knot, eyes cast downwards. Bottom lip worried at the corner of his mouth, sucked inwards as he fidgets anxiously. “Anija, you’re my only family left. I don’t care what the elders think of me. They don’t _have_ the right to judge me for what I do, when they have done worse things.”

“We have cousins, Genji. Cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents. Our mother still lives; I am not the only family you have.” Hanzo replies, kneeling to retrieve his bow and katana as well as his incense burner. The smell of aloeswood and sandalwood permeates the air, even though the incense has stopped smoking. “What we have done, we have done for our family.”

“No!” Genji shouts, rising like a tidal wave, emotional and destructive. His hand settles on the meat of his brother’s upper arm, pulling him to face him. Softer, ashamed of his outburst, he speaks in hurried, hushed whispers. “No… I did it because of you, Hanzo. I did it because they told me they were trying to hurt you. The elders said that every person I killed wanted to hurt you. I won’t _kill_ for them anymore.”

Genji’s confession does little to dissuade Hanzo from his movements. When their mother had announced to her husband that she was pregnant, the elders must have immediately started planning. A second son, a presumptive heir. Should something become of Hanzo, it would be Genji’s task to lead the clan — whilst Hanzo was honed into the sharp edge of a blade, Genji became a shadow, born for the sole purpose to protect his brother. The elders knew this and perhaps, had knowingly manipulated his younger brother.

“We were bred for our purposes in life, Genji, as Father was. It is what must be done.” Hanzo starts, but Genji pushes him away, cutting him off. The leviathan under his skin itches, crawls beneath the flesh, crackling around his bones. _He is so disrespectful. Make him regret it. Make him bleed._ Again, the elder shakes his head to clear away the thoughts.

“I’m leaving, _anija_.” Genji won’t look at him, keeping his eyes cast down. Hanzo starts, brow furrowing as he stares at the shameful way his younger brother refuses to look upwards. “I talked to Overwatch about — about joining them.”

The heir’s blood runs cold, the somber tone of their discussion souring further, into something worse; between his ribs, his heart stops, lungs struggling to pull enough air in to satisfy his body. Genji had betrayed them, betrayed _him?_ What had they offered him? What had they _done_ to make Genji so willingly turn his blade against his own brother? Overwatch was not a peaceful organization, although they campaigned for it — they would spearhead the destruction of their family business, and crumble every inch of the Shimada name until they were nothing but ashes and the memories of legends, like their dragons before them.

Genji was not just a liability; Genji was a traitor. Genji had betrayed _him_.

And Genji is speaking, but the words are garbled, as if Hanzo’s head has been pressed deep underwater. His eyes flit from the entrances and exits of the temple back to his brother’s eyes, watching for any sort of panic or anger, but his lips still move.

Hanzo speaks even when Genji’s lips have not stopped. “You...have spoken to Overwatch?”

“Yes, they’re going to -”

“You are leaving...the clan?”

“Yes, anija. I told you that -”

“You are leaving me?”

Genji stops. Hanzo stares, transfixed on the space where his brother stands before him. “I...want you to come with me. We deserve a real life, Hanzo, not the life of criminals.” Genji pauses, looking down at his hands, still nervously clenching around his clothing. “I’m only leaving because of you.” _Because of you._ Unresponsive, dissociating — Hanzo watches the myriad of emotions flicker through his younger brother’s face. Worry, dismay, nervousness, insecurity, fear — all black emotions that bleed out from his brother, all in fear of what was to become of his brother and he. “Hanzo?”

Genji reaches out with a hand, as if to comfort, but Hanzo is faster, Hanzo has always been faster. Lightning quick, his hand jolts out and clutches at his brother’s wrist, tight enough to feel the bird thin bones shift under his grip. He twists, pulling Genji’s wrist and arm behind his back and sending his brother into forward bend; Genji, for all his training, moves too fast, too hard, desperate to escape his brother’s wrist lock, to come face to face with his brother.

It snaps.

Genji cries out as his brother looses his grip enough, backing away. Hurriedly, the younger pulls away from his brother, electricity shooting down the length of his limply hanging arm. “Hanzo -- Ha-Hanzo -- my -- my arm!” His face pales as nausea rises up in his belly, bubbling bile that is only barely held back, hand clasped over his mouth to keep himself from being sick. Horrorstruck, Genji moves to kneel, balancing himself as the wave of vertigo washes over him. The last time his arm had been broken, he’d been trying to show off and had fallen off to the gazebo in the garden, crying as Hanzo had sat with him after sending a servant to fetch their parents.

But that was so long ago — and it hadn’t been Hanzo’s fault, but his brother watches him struggling to breathe and keep his system from falling into shock. Turning his eyes up, Genji starts to speak. “Anija --”

“What did they tell you?” A swift kick to his brother’s jaw sends the younger prone, crying out as his broken arm shifts, the edges of sharp bone beginning to poke out of his skin. Within Hanzo’s belly, the shifting, coiling, slithering mass of monstrous energy pools out, filling veins with white-hot poison and lacing his bones with venom. The ugly edges frayed ever further until beneath the skin of the heir lay a demon, sharp horns and teeth, awaiting his time to come. “What did they offer you in exchange for betraying me?”

“They didn’t offer me _anything,_ Hanzo — I -” Genji replies, trying to roll onto his good side, in hopes of bracing himself to sit back up. Yet again, his brother is faster, putting a heel against the head of his ulna, the ligaments under his skin cracking with the pressure. “ _Anija, anija, please._ ”

The wintry stare Hanzo gives his brother forces a whimper to bubble from his lips; they’d dug fingers into hip bones before, bony knuckles driven into solar plexus’ during the harsh regiments their Father forced them to go through. Pain was neither a friend nor a foe, something they’d both become well-known to seeing, like a relative seen once or twice a year. His heel moves down from where it rests until it sits comfortably on the first and second finger of his hand. Slowly putting pressure down on it, Genji’s face twists in agony as he tries to squirm away. “What did they give you”

“Nothing!” Hanzo’s head tilts, plump lips tightening into a line. “Hanzo — Hanzo they didn’t — they -” Interrupted with a shout as his brother digs the meat of his heel into the first two fingers, the visceral sound of his fingers popping, cracking. Dislocation? A fracture? The pain of his arm had not fully caught up with him, more horrified and nauseous from the fact that it had been his brother who had done it to him — but this one, the pain so acute he could feel it in the back of his mouth, down into the nerves in his teeth. “Please Hanzo! Please, I didn’t — I didn’t.”

The blank eyed stare focused on the twisting, agonized face of his younger brother couldn’t be _Hanzo._ Something was wrong, something did not feel right. The elder had always been overprotective, fretting over the smallest details when they did not align perfectly with his plan. As Genji had aged, Hanzo’s own worry streak had aged — no longer did he fret so publicly, but in the private safe house of their rooms. _Where did you go tonight? Did anyone follow you home? Show me your back, your thighs, your stomach. Show me the places where they bruised and marked you so I can replace them with my own._

Hanzo would never do this to him — _no_ , Genji thinks, hazed over as his mind fumbles over the hundreds of sensations of pain in hopes of stilling his thoughts. _Anija would never do this to me; Hanzo, the elders’ pawn, he would._ “You are lying. What did they give you?” His foot moves towards his other fingers, already putting pressure on the digits, but Genji keens, low in his throat, as tears prick at the corners of his eyes.

“They — they said — they said I could get away. That they’d give us a new -” Fresh tears curl down his cheekbones, leaving hot tracks down tawny skin, as he squirms, losing the feeling in both his arm and fingers slowly. A half glance towards his brother’s taloned feet reassures him that, _yes,_ his fingers are starting to swell, the fluid and blood gushing out of the fractures, although he cannot feel it. They’ve begun to curl inwards, a pantomime of a clawed hand. Again, the nausea rises up in his throat but he powers through it to speak further. “New identities — new lives.” The heir presses further down, letting up for a moment — just enough for Genji to see that these fingers still wiggle, still move. He hasn’t broken them, not yet.

“What did you tell them?” He asks, moving away from the fingers. A flourish, a tightly controlled and leashed gesture of his hand, has his younger brother immediately moving to hold the broken fingers to his chest, whimpering as they begin to swell, purpling with the panic of blood, the other arm lying limp. “If you move from where you are, I’ll break your legs too.”

A hiccup directs the attention of the heir to the younger, sharp black eyes following every minuscule movement, every half second breath. Genji is crying, fat tears that well and spill, sniffling back every few seconds. It grates on his ears, sandpaper on microphone, fingers twitching around nothing, the desire to strangle and maim rising.

“Hanzo, Ha-Hanzo, I told them everything. The — the trades we do, the suppliers, the main heads of every family. The turf wars, the -” He swallows, sucking in a gulp of air. He tries to continue, his mouth opening, closing, forming around the syllables of the words, but he sobs. _Disappointing._ Hanzo had thought his brother had been taught to endure pain — the second son, the presumptive heir, their playboy child presented the highest amount of danger to the family. Kidnapping, extortion, ransom — Genji had been raised with the knowledge that mayhaps one day, he would befall such a fate and have to keep the secrets of his family, his _brother_ , locked tight in his coffin body.

A shadow of the elder brother who’d comforted him moves, cool, approaching languidly, serpentine. “Oh Genji…” The voice trickles like molasses down the younger’s spine, as Hanzo moves to kneel before him. His gloved fingers come away to wipe at the sweat slick bangs, caressing his brother’s face. “Is this my fault? Was I too soft on you? Did I spoil you too much?”

“Hanzo — Hanzo — anija — big br-”

The deafening crack of Hanzo’s fist following through with his brother’s jaw is enough to make his own iron stomach flip, curling in on itself as the waves of nausea pass over him. The suddenness of the punch, the sudden rush of blood and the immediate swelling keep Genji from crying out, still trying to speak over the now broken bone. Crimson bubbling out of his mouth as he slurs Hanzo’s name, explanations that were long ago lost on his ears.

“You had the world, Genji.” The heir starts, watching the pathetic way his brother curls into himself, trying to push himself up into a standing position. _This is not my brother. My brother is dead._ “I spat at the feet of our family to protect you but this -” The rage, like blood, white-hot like death, bubbles from the repressed place he’d kept it at, exploding out like an Arctic storm.. Watching Genji struggle to lift himself, crying out as he puts pressure on broken fingers, is like watching a dying dog crawl towards traffic — sickening, pathetic. _Unworthy._ “This is unacceptable.”

Teeth unable to slot correctly into place, Genji slurs, broken, aching. “Anija, please, you wouldn’t hurt me -” Their fights had never been more than childish arguments, the act of brothers not exactly three years but close enough, pushing each other, wrestling. When they’d struck each other as children, crying when the other would cry in pain, they would never have done this, never have broken bones, seen the blood and considered it a causality of brotherhood war. Resting his uninjured arm against the wall near the scroll, Genji sways, a ship on tumultuous waters.“Anija, please, let me go, please -”

“You cannot leave me!” The slice of a blade across Genji’s back freezes the elder, watching the spatter of blood against the washi. The scream that erupts, wet and visceral, leaves the heir shaking, body trembling like an earthquake. When, in the fight, had he pulled his blade? — the wet drip of blood off the sharpened edge onto the tatami floors as Genji crumples to the floor. The gash leaves Hanzo sick, the ivory bones of his brother’s vertebrae peaking out from behind the blood, spine so clearly visible. “Genji — ?” Starch cream of his top weighted down with the crimson, the fabric sliced completely through. He does not move, broken bones purple and swollen, his back not even giving an indication of movement. _He’s not breathing._

A death rattle, Hanzo thinks, as whisper quiet gurgling breaks the tension. Slurred and hoarse, his body struggling to speak, “Ani — anija…” The blood pooling out underneath him catches the light, reflecting an image of the elder’s face. The heir stares, black eyes wide, the spatter of blood across the bridge of his nose, looking down on the prone form of his dying brother. _Monster._ He looks like a monster - not unlike the voidhearted heir the elders and council so desperately wanted. Silent tears flow down Genji’s face, mixing into the blood until it is rose pink, soft enough that it does not seem true. “Han-Hanzo…it hurts...”

As if all at once, Hanzo, the brother, and Hanzo, the heir, click into one being.  — his hands covered in blood, his body, his heart, his chest. The horror and nauseous feeling in the pit of his stomach, rolling bile that starts to rise, is Hanzo’s — it is not this beast, this leviathan that he’d claimed so often ago had been the source of his rage, dragons-fire and hatred born of legend. His brother, lying dying, crying in the same way that he always had. _Anija, it hurts. Hanzo, I don’t like the pain. Make it quick Hanzo; make it quick and kill me so I don’t have to hurt._

The katana clatters to the floor, echoing in the temple, loosened from Hanzo’s grip. He cannot afford to look at it, even as he moves to kneel aside his brother, dragging dark hakama through the blood. It sticks to his knees as he leans down to turn Genji over, watching the slowing movement of his eyes, fluttering stilling underneath his lids. In the peaceful wake of death, the younger seems calmed, peaceful - the kindness plucked away from both of them like flower petals in a lovestruck girl’s fingers seems closer to him in death than in life. Silent as the death that had come between them, Hanzo strokes trembling hands down tawny skin, hoping to feel warmth but finding only the cool grasp of the death gods, warmth leeched away by icy fingers.

Stinging tears bite at the corner of his eyes, willed away by the years of training and self control even as he looks at his brother, lying dead in his arms. Swarms of locusts fill his head, buzzing with the thoughts of suicide, mental illness long since repressed reborn with the tragedy of fratricide. _You killed him. Kinslayer. Brotherkiller. The gods cannot forgive you for your transgressions._

Would the gods even weep?

Could they?

**Author's Note:**

> [ [nsfw twitter](http://twitter.com/SLUTGENJI) / [ko-fi](https://ko-fi.com/A34615S0) ]


End file.
